I Should've Read Teaching For Dummies

When I was younger I thought teachers wrote a script before each day of teaching and rehearsed it in front of their spouse or the principal. It amazed me that each day teachers would be prepared with hours of things to say and do. It still amazes me now. On Monday, it’s my first day of teaching and I’m at a loss. I realize now that it’s impossible to write a script because you have no clue what the students will say or how they’ll react.

A secret that many people might not know (certainly the people at IEFT who made the decision that I was fit to teach at their school didn’t) is that I really have never taught. I’ve been a “teacher” before. For two months the summer after sophomore year at Trinity I was at the Bo’ai Experimental School in Xi’an, China teaching two summer sessions of students. But really what I did was dread each day, walk to class with trepidation, end up playing UNO or Bingo with the students, try to answer their questions, or write meaningless exercises on the chalk board.

Some people think I was essentially teaching when I worked in Hong Kong for two years, but I wasn’t. There were real professors who did that. I just edited papers, corrected tests, held help sessions at the library, ran fun activities, and a bunch of other things that wasn’t teaching. But I wasn’t supposed to teach; my job title was ‘Visiting Tutor.’ I know there were other visiting tutors (there were six of us each year) who did sometimes lead the class. Whenever the professors I worked with would mention that possibility, I would dread it, and lucky for me it never happened.

While in Hong Kong, I did do some teaching on the side for extra money, but again, it wasn’t real teaching. At the Asian Association of Lifelong Learning, I would be in charge of a group of five or six young kids and would help them fill out workbook sheets, watch movies with them, or help them pronounce English words. They were students whose parents thought an extra hour of English practice after school was a wise thing.

All of these things look great on a resume when applying to be an English teacher – I guess this is a confession of sorts – but I don’t know the first thing about teaching, English or otherwise.

The only aspect of teaching that I do have concrete experience on is being on the receiving end of it. I must say that I’ve been an excellent student. Lately I’ve been racking my brain thinking about the teachers who I loved, who were effective at what they did. The first one that comes to mind is Mrs. Bernstein. I think she is the one about whom my script theory was derived. I had her for second and third grade. She was always in charge of the class in a firm, matter-of-fact way, but somehow managed to still win the respect and love from all her students. She was great at what she did. I saw her years later – maybe fifteen years later – when I was a waitress in Chappaqua. It was after I was done with Hong Kong but before I realized Alaska was in my future. I don’t know what I was expecting from our brief exchange, but our interaction wasn’t anything memorable. After all, she was just a normal person, someone meeting up with friends for lunch. She wasn’t the perfect woman wearing the perfect dress in the perfect classroom.

Besides recalling the great teachers I’ve had, and there were many, many more after Mrs. Bernstein, I’ve also been thinking, naturally, about the foreign language teachers I’ve had throughout my education. There was Madame Baker for French who had us cut out pictures and words from magazines and newspaper that illustrated Le Monde Francophone, explained what a Bouche de Noel was, and said in her very real French accent, “Now I will show you how to cut the cheese,” to the howls of an eighth grade class. From the five or six years of French I took in middle and high school – I had Madame Michelle in later years – there are only a handful of phrases I can recall. Granted, this is hardly the fault of the teacher but more so of a distracted, non-caring student.

And then there was Ma Laoshi at Trinity. She really was trying to teach a group of native English speakers how to speak her native tongue, and I think she did a fairly decent job. She was terrible at the tones – making us do them, that is – but she was good at everything else. I remember we had a pretty good textbook, and she supplemented it with vocabulary tests, making us go in front of the class with a partner and act out a scene, and other writing exercises.

The thing with teaching a foreign language is the teacher can only do some much. Ma Laoshi could’ve had us make a thousand flashcards and write a million exercises, but it was up to us to go out into the world and speak, to use the tools she gave us and communicate in Chinese. I never did this. Others in that class have.

Right now, Scott is sitting across from me with a science textbook in his lap. He asked me a while ago what I was doing. I said that I was writing about not being able to teach, to which he replied, “Instead of writing about not being able to teach, why don’t you prepare to teach?” I guess that’s the only thing I can do. I can prepare, not with a script, but with a plan. I can only do the best that I can, that’s what I can offer my eager Tanzanian students, and hopefully the teaching will fall into place.